FEATURE
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LEGACY OF A LIFETIME:
Courtesy photo A photo of Army veteran Haywood Donerson saluting the flag during a Memorial Day ceremony at Patch Barracks graces the cover of the Stuttgart Citizen in 2005.
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Stuttgart Citizen, January 2021
Citizen cover photo captures veteran’s essence, marks his grave By Rick Scavetta U.S. Army Garrison Stuttgart Haywood Donerson liked sitting at his favorite table outside the Panzer Kaserne PX, flipping through the Stuttgart Citizen – his hometown newspaper. Community members would call out to him, “Hey, Mr. D.” Donerson would often carry a copy to Leonberg, where he lived with his German wife Sibylle and their daughter, Patricia. “He always brought it home,” said Sibylle Johner-Donerson about the Stuttgart Citizen. “It was always present. You have dates and things in there that you didn’t find in the Stars and Stripes. This was for us, for here.” The U.S. Army began publishing the Stuttgart Citizen, an eight-page weekly newspaper for Americans, on Dec. 3, 1973, shortly after Donerson arrived at the garrison. A native of Washington, D.C., Donerson enlisted in 1955, at age 17, serving overseas in Korea and three tours in Vietnam. A music lover who personally knew singer Marvin Gaye, Donerson performed as a disc jockey in Stuttgart and across Germany. In the 1970’s, the Stuttgart Citizen featured activities, to include the dances where Donerson performed. It was at one of those venues, in 1976, where he met Sibylle. A year later, he retired and chose to remain in Germany. Over the years, Donerson became well known among the military community and to Germans off post. Handsome, dapper and “old school,” Donerson always attracted people who wanted to talk to him, his wife said. By the 1980’s, Donerson watched the Citizen grow into a strong community voice, to include letters to the editor and marketplace want ads. The decade began with news on a presidential directive to establish Black History Month. That winter, Army engineers from Stuttgart dug out a U.S.-run ski center in
Garmisch, after three feet of snow fell in a day. The troops earned a free day on the slopes. Back at Panzer Kaserne, Citizen reporters covered a tragedy, when a local Soldier died in a freak accident. He plugged in a coffee pot and static electricity ignited a nearby antitank weapon, killing him. In 1983, daughter Patricia came along, three months premature. After work, at a civilian job on post, Donerson would visit her in the intensive care unit for infants, speaking reassuring words through the incubator. “He walked up, said a word and her oxygen values and heart monitor went up,” Johner-Donerson said. Patricia recovered and Donerson settled in to fatherhood, while living in Leonberg and making German friends there. Meanwhile, during the early 1980’s, training was underway for a new tank – the M1 Abrams, which made the local news. The Citizen included features like the dying art of spit-shining combat boots and AFN Stuttgart’s manager describing the five years he spent as a POW in Vietnam. The Citizen staff’s hard work did not go unnoticed, wrote Capt. Bill Maddox, the Citizen’s editor. “Any success the Citizen has had is directly attributed to the soldiers laboring to find the perfect photo angle, searching for a lead to start a story or tearing their hair out trying to track down someone with information for an article,” Maddox wrote. “Demanding editors were no help.” During the 1990’s, the Citizen continued to provide local coverage as U.S. military members in Stuttgart deployed to the Middle East and the Balkans. Features then included the Army blocking Internet chat rooms and a new column called “Thorns N’ Roses,” the forerunner to ICE comments or Facebook, where community members voiced whether they liked or disliked a garrison service. As the end of the 20th century drew
